New Delhi, Oct. 23 -- Had Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, not gone to prison for fraud over the collapse of his defunct crypto exchange, he might have been considered among the greatest ever venture capitalists. He was an early investor in Anthropic (an AI giant valued at up to $2trn), Cursor (a coding software-maker acquired by SpaceX this year for $60bn) and Robinhood (a trading platform with a market capitalisation of $92bn). His 8% stake in Anthropic alone might be worth $160bn today, had it not been sold by the FTX estate. Even the owner of his old bitcoin-mining assets raised nearly $900bn this month.

Mr Bankman-Fried was nothing if not brilliant. But at the moment of FTX's collapse in 2022, brilliance was of little value. I...